First SEALs (21 page)

Breaking radio silence, the UDT commanding officer yelled at the admiral, “
Get your goddamn cowboys out of there!”

The planes broke off the attack before the friendly fire caused any casualties. Despite the barrage of bullets, the swimmers managed to complete their measurements of the beach and safely return to the destroyer. After determining that demolition would be required for the landing craft to approach, the combat swimmers returned to the water, this time towing explosives. Without their LARUs, the men had to resort to other techniques to set the charges. “I held my breath over two minutes so we could go down and stay down and set the charge,” recalled Kenworthy.

“
Boom!”

The explosives detonated, shooting shards of coral high into the air. “
It was sickening because thousands of fish were also killed by the explosion. I still remember their white little bellies,” added Kenworthy.

The reef was clear, providing passage into the beach, but the job wasn't done yet. Hovering five or six feet below the surface, the swimmers carefully guided the landing craft through the holes in the coral blown by Kenworthy and his men, allowing the young men who would take part in the assault access to the enemy-infested beach. Kenworthy remembered, “
This was a powerful thing as you looked at the clenched faces of these 18- and 20-year-olds and in another fifteen or twenty minutes they were dead. It's a visual thing you carry with you all your life.” Despite the UDT casualties, the Allies successfully assaulted and seized Angaur.

UDT 10'
S NEXT MISSION
was to lead the invasion of the Philippines. On October 19, 1944, six American battleships began their bombardment of the island of Leyte, the first stop in the liberation of the Philippines. About an hour after the big guns started firing, the swimmers of UDT 10 scrambled down cargo nets into the waiting boats that would take them closer to shore. Their job was to level the beach to enable landing craft to bring American troops to shore. The order called for them to conduct their mission in broad daylight, armed only with combat knives and the explosives they needed to blast a path through the rocks and reef.

The boats carrying the swimmers stopped about four hundred yards off shore—well within the range of the Japanese guns and mortars on the beach. The swimmers methodically dropped over the sides and got to work. OSS operative and former Marine Les Bodine recalled, “
As we swam forward the water around us was being peppered with machine-gun, rifle, and mortar fire. Water was splashing up around me from the rounds. I noticed that the Japanese had fish traps in the water in front of the beach. They
turned out to be markers that allowed them to direct their mortar and cannon fire.”

One of those mortar rounds landed nearly on top of Bodine, and he lost consciousness almost immediately. (Years later he learned that the concussion blast had pushed his body down to the ocean floor—about ten feet underwater.) “
When you get hit by an explosion like that,” he said, “water goes into every orifice: The ears, nose, rectum, and tears things up a little bit. I was spitting up blood and blacked out.” One of Bodine's team members inflated the life preserver connected to his swim trunks and towed him back to the boats, where the doctor dosed him with whiskey. “It burned,” remembered Bodine. “My eardrums and stomach have scar tissue, but the next day we went back in.”

OPERATIONAL SWIMMER GROUP II, ARAKAN COAST, BURMA, EARLY 1945

As his small craft bobbed on the ocean waves, John Booth squinted ahead, searching the horizon in vain for any sign of the
chaung,
or tidal river, that was the mission target. His hands, like those of his companions, were rough and raw from nine hours of paddling his two-man kayak. The night was dark, limiting visibility and making it all but impossible to see the tiny waterway. “
We had a compass bearing to a line of blackness,” recalled Booth.

Finding the passage at last, they headed upstream, scouting for Japanese activity. Not too far ahead, they observed an enemy patrol boat approach their position. “We were along the banks in our kayaks,” remembered Booth. “They missed us as they went by.” The swimmers completed their reconnaissance and turned around. After nine more brutal hours of paddling, they returned safely to base.

Upon reading the mission report, one of the British officers assigned to work with the MU asked, “
Why didn't you put a grenade in that Japanese boat?”

Annoyed, Booth immediately shot back, “What does clandestine mean?”

Later he noted, “
We weren't there for a shoot 'em up; we were there to get information. These were second generation British officers who were trying to make a name for themselves, earn medals, and they died by the bushel.”

L
ATER DURING THE SUMMER
of 1944, a separate group of OSS swimmers, led by Chris Lambertsen and Lieutenant John Booth, known as Operational Swimmer Group II (OSG II), headed for the Pacific, independent of the group that became part of UDT 10. The swimmer commandos first went to Burma. Due to a lack of Japanese shipping targets, their primary task would be to conduct reconnaissance along the Arakan Coast, but they also assisted with transporting agents, particularly when operatives were to be dropped off on a beach that needed to be scouted ahead of time. The swimmer commandos were combining intelligence gathering with special operations much like their later-day SEAL counterparts. To assist with their mission they brought with them a variety of gear, including LARUs, a submarine, fast patrol boats, and two-man kayaks, as well as the “Sleeping Beauty” submersible. Booth, assigned to pilot the underwater craft, didn't feel it was up to the task of navigating the treacherous Pacific waters. “
It ran pretty good, but it wasn't good enough to risk my life with it,” he explained. “The batteries leaked acid, and the currents were too strong in Burma.” He continued, “These days, most high school projects are more advanced. However, the mission and the tactics we were developing helped pioneer underwater demolition.”

The Burmese mission also helped modern military forces, like the SEALs and the Green Berets, understand the need for local language experts. When the MU team returned to the Burmese coast for additional intelligence gathering, they encountered a group of natives in a canoe. Unfortunately none of the Americans spoke
Burmese fluently. Booth put his pistol to the head of one of the men in the craft. “
Where are the Japanese?” he recited in Burmese. It was one of the few questions he knew. But when the scared villager responded, Booth “was lost.” He later remarked, “It was kind of ridiculous. A lot of stuff we did, the Special Forces refined.” Today Special Operations forces typically have at least two men on a team who speak the native tongue.

O
VER THE NEXT YEAR
,
the MU conducted a number of other missions in the region, including several that involved OSS operative Walter Mess. A former lawyer from northern Virginia, Mess headed off to war at the age of twenty-eight, and the OSS soon recruited him. (Later he would become a prominent real estate mogul involved in the development of the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., and live to the ripe old age of ninety-eight.) He transported Booth and the men of OSG II on many occasions. Of his time in the Pacific, Mess recalled, “
Shooting wasn't our mission. Our mission was taxi driver. Our mission was not to fight, but we were prepared to do it.” Many of the transportation assignments required the MU operatives to memorize elaborate course changes and follow a path based on dead reckoning. “Many of the missions were fifty to seventy miles behind the lines, moving up shallow
chaungs
,” explained Mess. “Try picturing running a patrol boat up Washington, D.C.'s Rock Creek Park River without attracting attention.” Somehow the teams managed it, moving “silently at night right through Japanese gun emplacements and encampments.” Mess added, “I still remember going by the Japanese camps at night seeing the soldiers and their fires.”

MU operatives were routinely assigned to protect SO agents who were returning from completed missions. Mess recalled, “
If we were under fire, we would use a bicycle tire to snatch the men. They would stick their arms up, and we'd hook them with the
bicycle tire and swing them into the boat, using the bicycle tire as a hook.”

Although many of the MU missions on the western coast of Burma involved transporting agents and swimmers into and out of the country, they did get to employ their swimming skills on a few occasions. In January 1945, the Allies began the invasion of Ramree. In preparation for the assault the OSS set up a new base of operations in the coastal town of Kyaukpyu. Believing the area around the main jetty was mined, the OSS sent John Booth and three other swimmers on a reconnaissance mission. Using their LARUs and other underwater gear, the four men determined that there were no active mines in the area. However, they did discover “
several wires and old wreckage,” which they removed. As a result, they were able to bring boats safely into the area.

The swimmers also took part in several operations to determine whether various beaches were suitable for use in invasions. On January 25–26, a team of ten, including Booth, Eubank, and Lambertsen, conducted a reconnaissance of Sagu Island off the Burmese coast. PT boats took the men into the vicinity of the area, then they switched to kayaks before swimming the final leg of the journey. Again their underwater equipment proved invaluable as they were able to find a suitable beach, which the British forces used for their landing.

During the course of their operations, Lambertsen continued to enhance the capabilities of the LARU. As the rebreather evolved, the men conducted even more difficult missions and remained underwater for longer periods of time. As a scientist and a medical doctor, Lambertsen was also reporting the impact of underwater activity on the human body. His extensive scientific research and the ongoing development of his device helped set the stage for future underwater activities by the SEALs and would be invaluable to the military and underwater diving in general.